Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy involves talking about what’s going on in your life now, what’s happened to you in the past, and how your past experiences can affect how you think, feel and behave in the present day.

We aim to help you make connections between the past and the present so that you can become more aware of how you may be using past experiences to ‘code’ events that happen in the present context, but may not represent the most appropriate way of acting in those current circumstances.

By doing this we can help you to reflect on how you can start to make decisions and behave based on how you are feeling now instead of what has happened in the past.

Here at the Tranceform Psychology clinic, our main psychodynamic therapy is psychoanalysis which is one of the talking therapies.

How Long Does Psychodynamic Therapy Take?

Unlike ‘brief’ therapy interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy tends to be a more ‘long-term’ proposition lasting anywhere from around 6 months to several years.

At Tranceform Psychology, however, we would expect clients to get beneficial effects (provided the client actively participates fully within the process) after about 15 to 20 sessions which falls inline with what NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) advocate for effective therapeutic time frames.

Bear in mind, however, that EVERY individual is different and may require more or less work.

Psychodynamic therapy is normally drawn to a conclusion when the client decides that they have benefitted as opposed to a specific number of sessions.

The Therapeutic Relationship

One of the interesting facets about psychodynamic therapy, in contrast to some of the more ‘brief directive’ therapy modalities, is that the ‘relationship’ between the therapist and the client plays a ‘crucial’ role in the therapy’s effectiveness.

You can read more about the difference between psychodynamic v directive therapies here.

During the course of the psychodynamic therapy, a relationship of ‘trust’ begins to develop that allows difficult or emotional past experiences to be more easily ‘discussed’ – this is particularly relevant in the case of past experiences that may have been traumatic, embarrassing or guilt-laden.

This therapy relationship is also known as ‘Transference’ (or a transferential relationship) and in some ways become the ‘vehicle’ to solving the problems.

How Important is the Therapy Relationship?

Research by Michael Lambert and John Norcross has shed light on this question and suggests that around 12% of the therapy outcome can be attributed to the relationship that is created between therapist and client.

Interestingly, only 8% is attributed to the ‘type’ of therapy itself, 7% to the skills of the therapist with a massive 30% of the outcome resulting from what the client contributes themselves (how much time and effort they put into changing).

So, aside for the clients own contribution, the science argues that the therapy relationship is critical to a good outcome!

(Norcross, J. C. and Lambert, M. (2011) ‘Evidence-based therapy relationships’, in Norcross, J. C. (ed) Psychotherapy Relationships That Work: Evidence-based Responsiveness, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 3–24.)

Psychodynamic Therapy Effectiveness

Almost all proponents of their particular therapy specialism will tell you that their therapy is the best, so it is difficult to provide a definitive answer to this question.

However, there are a great many therapists who are prepared to concede that human beings do tend to deal with present day experiences in relation to past, formative experiences, and because of this, therapies that fully take into account this co-existence of past and present ‘processing’ are more likely to produce more profound results.

In fact, therapies can also be divided into two groups known as either ‘transformational’ or ‘incremental’ interventions.

Transformational therapy aims to create fundamental personal change whilst Incremental therapy looks more to providing ‘coping’ strategies for the symptoms.

Psychoanalysis falls under the category of transformational therapy.

Free Initial Consultations for Psychodynamic Therapy

We offer all prospective clients a free initial consultation to discuss your mental health problems prior to commencing any psychodynamic therapy or counselling.

The consultation is free and lasts around 50 minutes.

During this consultation we will discuss the various types of psychological therapy that are available to you and make a considered recommendation based on your individual personal circumstances.

Initial consultations are also available as part of our online counselling service.

At Tranceform Psychology we emphasise the importance of the therapy relationship in helping people to bring about effective change, so its important to be able to ‘meet’ to discuss our change programmes BEFORE proceeding.

Our policy is to help people make a fully balanced & considered decision about undertaking mental health work with us, including both the financial and personal implications.